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Charters & Choice

Two months ago, Mathematica and the Center on Reinventing Public Education offered preliminary findings from their four-year study on charter-management organizations. The upshot: When it comes to student achievement, CMO performance varies widely. Two weeks ago, analysts put out a revised and extended version of their interim report, adding analyses on graduation and postsecondary enrollment rates (and school-level, as opposed to CMO-level, middle school impacts). The results are again mixed. Data were much scarcer for these graduation and post-secondary enrollment components (in part because fewer CMOs run high schools): Six CMOs had sufficient data to investigate their graduation rates and four had sufficient data to investigate post-secondary enrollment. Of these, two had significantly positive effects when compared to similar district schools, raising both graduation and postsecondary enrollment rates by about 20 percent. And one CMO had a significant negative impact (22 percent) on graduation rates. Meager data aside, one frustrating thread continues through each of these published preliminary reports: Which CMOs raise college enrollment rates by 20 percent? And which lowers graduation rates by that same amount? Mathematica and CRPE never say. The project’s culminating report is due out in March. We wait with bated breath for the authors to name names.

Like the Hatfields and McCoys or the Montagues and Capulets, charter and district schools have a tradition of feuding. Districts have been known to waylay charters’ funding; charter leaders to wage legal battles against their local districts. Yet this sixth edition of Hopes, Fears & Reality (which depicts the status of the charter movement annually, with a pause in 2010) argues that a truce may be near. These nine chapters offer examples of districts and charters that have already begun to collaborate through the “portfolio management model” (PMM) of schooling—and explains how to tackle the philosophical and technical issues that stand in the way of further implementation of this new (and radically different) model of organizing districts. (In the PMM set-up, a central district office oversees a diverse portfolio of schools, instead of a group of cookie-cutter neighborhood schools; more background on PMM hereand here). One chapter, for example, details how Baltimore enacted its city-wide choice program, which allows students to choose one of about thirty district or charter schools in their area. Another discusses how charters and the district came to share facilities in Denver. The authors note mutual benefits for strategic collaboration: Districts can exploit charters’ flexibility to leverage greater equity and higher student achievement; charters can partner with districts to (finally) ensure equitable funding. Portfolio districts are a fresh and intriguing prospect...

Subsidiarity is an organizing principle rarely discussed outside the Catholic Church and the European Union, and it’s a shame so few academics and advocates of school choice in the United States talk about it. It is a principle that is skeptical about the ability of large bureaucracies to trump smaller units' capacities to function for the common good. At this past weekend’s inaugural international school choice conference in Fort Lauderdale, an Italian researcher introduced the concept to describe why a stubborn region in his country could not accept the government’s insistence that public education must be centrally administered. A sympathetic audience nodded in approval, but there was no obvious sign that the conference understood that its mission was just given political order.

Subsidiarity is a principle that is skeptical about the ability of large bureaucracies to trump smaller units' capacities to function for the common good.

If there was, it could have better informed the rhetorical jousting match that happened minutes later between Stanford University political scientist and union scourge Terry Moe and United Federation of Teachers vice president Leo Casey. For Moe, author of Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, the problem of public education is one of structure, organization. “Nobody has a coherent vision of the whole, and no one...

More than ten years ago, in what now seems like another life, I lived and studied in the former Soviet Union. I was an exchange student in Krasnodar, Russia, not far from Ukraine and Georgia. Krasnodar is the heartland of the “red belt,” where nostalgia for the Communist era still runs high – despite all the dysfunction caused by that system, especially in its death throes in the 1980s and 90s.

More democracy, not less, is what this movement is about.

Given my own experiences, I read Deborah Meier’s recent column comparing today’s education reformers in America to Boris Yeltsin (of all people!) with some trepidation. Meier is right that well-connected “new Russians” did a bang-up job buying state-owned property for a song in the 90s (really stealing it), creating billionaires overnight while leaving most ordinary citizens impoverished. She’s wrong, however, in thinking that “the people” ever controlled that property in the Soviet era, or that oligarchs and ed reformers both “smell property like a beast after prey.”

Despite Meier’s claims about Yeltsin doing away with “inconvenient” ownership of the state’s wealth by “the people,” wealth in the USSR was owned and controlled (in fact, if not in name) by the nomenklatura who ran industry, agriculture, and education for the socialist state. It goes without saying that party officials didn’t suffer from the food shortages that hit...

Is it time for Ohio to consider new forms of governance and management for its most troubled schools and districts, and, if so, what might alternatives look like? The question of what to do with long-suffering public schools has driven many of the country’s most significant education reforms. Both the No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top competition addressed failing schools and sought to force dramatic changes within them. States have also taken up the challenge. According to the Education Commission of the States there are at least 29 states that permit state takeovers of school districts for academic bankruptcy, fiscal mismanagement, and other problems, while at least 23 states provide for takeovers of school buildings.

But, despite both federal and state legislation and millions of dollars in things like “school improvement grants” there are still far too many schools that seem impervious to improvement efforts. Consider Cleveland where there are 15 elementary schools that have been rated Academic Emergency (F) by the state for at least the last four consecutive years. Collectively, these schools serve about 6,000 children and in 2010-11 they met a total of just eight state performance indicators out of a possible 225. In these schools fewer than half of the children attain basic proficiency in reading and mathematics by the time they leave eighth grade. Yet, these schools, and many others across the state, keep failing kids year after year. This despite all the talk, money, and policies aimed at school turnarounds...

Is it time for Ohio to consider new forms of governance and management for its most troubled schools and districts, and, if so, what might alternatives look like? The question of what to do with long-suffering public schools has driven many of the country’s most significant education reforms. Both the No Child Left Behind Act and Race to the Top competition addressed failing schools and sought to force dramatic changes within them. States have also taken up the challenge. According to the Education Commission of the States there are at least 29 states that permit state takeovers of school districts for academic bankruptcy, fiscal mismanagement, and other problems, while at least 23 states provide for takeovers of school buildings.

But, despite both federal and state legislation and millions of dollars in things like “school improvement grants” there are still far too many schools that seem impervious to improvement efforts. Consider Cleveland where there are 15 elementary schools that have been rated Academic Emergency (F) by the state for at least the last four consecutive years. Collectively, these schools serve about 6,000 children and in 2010-11 they met a total of just eight state performance indicators out of a possible 225. In these schools fewer than half of the children attain basic proficiency in reading and mathematics by...

School voucher critics generally approach their job reviewing the research on school choice with unfair assumptions, and otherwise insightful commentators risk recycling old canards. This is true with Thomas Toch’s critique of vouchers in the newest edition of Kappan, which concludes that voucher programs haven’t shown enough impact to justify their position in a large-scale reform effort. Questions of scale can lead to legitimate debate, but we’ll get nowhere until we acknowledge what’s in the literature.

Questions of scale can lead to legitimate debate, but we’ll get nowhere until we acknowledge what’s in the literature.

Toch grounds what he calls “the underwhelming record of voucher schools” first with an anecdotal report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which determined that America’s first voucher program “is very much like a teenager: heart-warmingly good at times, disturbingly bad at others.” The problem is that this newspaper report is nearly seven years old. We’ve learned so much since then, and at no time has the peer-reviewed science on the subject shown the back-and-forth swing from good to bad that the Journal Sentinel implied in 2005.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting Columbus Preparatory Academy, a K-8 Mosaica-run charter school on Columbus’s west side that is a poster child for the successful turnaround of a troubled school.

In 2008, the school was rated F by the state and student performance on state assessments was abysmal. Today the school is rated A+ (aka, Excellent with Distinction) and boasts achievement levels that best that of nearly all of the area’s top-performing schools (and are leaps and bounds above the state’s definition of “proficiency”). This transformation was achieved while the school continued serving a challenged student population – about 72 percent of students are economically disadvantaged and eligible for free or reduced-price lunch – and retained nearly all of the same teachers and staff members who were working in the school when it was failing (in a school that now employs 30 teachers, the principal said just seven or eight teachers have left during his four-year tenure).

So what are the keys to CPA’s success? Two things immediately stand out:

Leadership. Principal Chad Carr (who has led the turnaround since taking over the school four years ago) is committed to the success of his students, staff, and school like few others in his field. I don’t say that lightly as I know a lot of absolutely terrific school leaders, but spend five minutes with Carr and...

This annual report from the union-funded National
Education Policy Center (NEPC) profiles the nation’s Education Management Organizations—defined
here as both nonprofit and for-profit entities that manage public schools, both
district and charter. The NEPC offers trends in EMO growth and achievement, as
well as profiles of almost 300 such entities.
A few interesting tidbits: Enrollment in schools managed by nonprofit
EMOs significantly trumps that of the for-profit kind, yet for-profits have
squeezed into more states (thirty-three vs. nonprofits’ twenty-nine).
For-profit entities disproportionately manage elementary schools (56 percent of
their schools are K-5 compared to 37 percent of nonprofits’). And district
schools managed by nonprofit EMOs fare significantly worse than their charter counterparts on measures of AYP (14
percent of district schools met AYP compared to 56 percent of charters).
Interesting stuff, but beware of simplistic conclusions. These descriptive data
are helpful, but can’t begin to tell us about the effectiveness of these
respective organizations. For that, at least on the nonprofit side, see the
Center on Reinventing Education’s pioneering work on
CMOs instead.

What does online learning really cost? Can it, in fact, be both better in terms of improving student achievement and overall less expensive than traditional bricks and mortar schools? These fundamental questions are what the Fordham Institute’s new paper, “The Cost of Online Learning”, gamely tries to tackle. In short, paper shows that online learning has the potential to save education money while also improving the quality of instruction available to students.

The Parthenon Group (the national research firm that helped craft Ohio’s winning Race to the Top application) provided the research. They conducted more than 50 interviews with entrepreneurs, policy experts and school leaders across the country to come up with “an informed set of estimates regarding the cost of virtual and blended schools” across five categories – labor (teacher and administrators), content acquisition, technology and infrastructure, school operations, and student support.

Using these five categories as the basis of comparison the researchers compared a “typical” traditional model (brick and mortar school where instruction is delivered by teachers), a “typical” blended model (students attend brick and mortar schools where they alternate between online and in-person instruction) and a “typical” full virtual model (all instruction takes place online). In blended schools like Carpe Diem, Rocketship, and KIPP Empower, technology is used as a tool to personalize instruction for students who spend part of their...